We just made it much easier to find what you’re looking for on our website.

We launched an update to tpchd.org that will improve your user experience. The goal was to provide clear paths to the information you need to protect and improve your health.

It’ll mean a simpler visit for infrequent users. Regular users might need a moment to reacclimate.

Don’t worry! We’ll tell you what moved, what improved, and why the changes will be better for everyone in the long run.

It’s all about you.

Our staff is a busy group. We have about 70 programs, many of which do several different things.

That means we have lots of content on our website. And THAT means it can be hard to dig up what you’re looking for.  

So, we rethought our structure from our users’ perspectives. Some of you are looking for info to improve your family’s personal health. Some of you want to protect our environment, or make sure your home is healthy. Some of you are professionals, doing anything from operating restaurants to designing septic systems to providing healthcare.

Until now, we’ve grouped pages from our perspective. Our Food team offers info on code changes for food businesses and how to prepare food safely at home, for instance—but those two pages are obviously for very different groups of people. Likewise, we have disease pages for the public that differ greatly from the more technical disease info on our Provider Resources pages.

So, our first step was to create 5 new categories:

• My Health, My Home, and My Environment: For the public.
• For Professionals: For people in the community whose work touches on public health in one way or another.
• Info: General information anyone might need about the Health Department.

Those categories are the new headers that make up what we call our megamenu. We used to offer four headers with anywhere from 40 to more than 100 links in each. Just about everything was there, but it was difficult to find anything.

None of the 5 new headers contains more than 13 links, all of which lead to helpful landing pages that funnel you to what you’re looking for.

Nearly every URL on our site changed as a result. But if you’re still coming to us from a bookmark or link, we’ve got you covered. The old URLs will automatically direct you to the new location.

More ways to find what you’re looking for.

Once we moved stuff around, we looked for ways to make it easier to find. That mostly meant some important but subtle changes to our homepage.

At the top of the page, you’ll see two important new links. One will take you directly to a page with all our permits and fees. The other will lead you to our new programs and services directory, which is alphabetical, searchable, and provides a brief description with a link to the best landing page.

Personally, when I go to a new website, I usually head straight to the search bar to look for what I need. Our analytics show lots of you do the same thing.

So, we made the search bar at the top of the homepage more prominent. We also added a larger search bar midway down the page, in case you scroll down and can’t find what you’re looking for.

And finally, we reorganized the homepage to make it more efficient. We made the lead image—we call it the rotator—a little smaller. We also added to the navigation buttons below the rotator, because our data shows people use those often. And we condensed and reorganized everything lower on the page, cutting it in half so you don’t have to scroll so much.

We’ve had these improvements in mind for a long time, so it feels good to finally put them to work for you. Let us know if you have any questions or feedback about the project! You can email news@tpchd.org.